Mrs. Prettyman scowled at Paul through the crack as he shut the door. He drew a shallow breath and stooped to switch on the air conditioner under his front window; the unit began to chug, pouring a dank mist into the room.
“Hey, kitty,” Paul said in a monotone. “I got a raise today. Good news, huh?”
Ever since his final confrontation with the living Charlotte, her ghost had been a continuous presence in Paul’s life, waxing and waning like the moon — always there, but not always immediately visible. Paul’s memory was deliberately vague about the reasons for his murderous rage at the cat, but he did remember that he was responsible for her death by drowning in his bathtub. During the time he’d lived with Kymberly, Charlotte had been a sly presence, appearing only to Paul, and only fleetingly, tripping him in the middle of the night when he got up to use the bathroom or nipping his toes with her freezing teeth when he went back to bed. When he was trying to write his book, Charlotte got up to her old tricks, unplugging his computer while he was working or weaving between his legs, dank and cold, making him jump right out of his chair. Kym never said a word about Charlotte until the very end of the day Paul moved out, after he had finished loading his few remaining possessions into the back of his Colt. As he lowered himself, exhausted and sweating, onto the sagging springs of his car and pulled the squealing door shut, Kym bolted coltishly out of the house and stooped at his open window. Her hand pressed to her throat, her forehead knotted, she blinked at Paul’s lap as she worked up the nerve to speak.
“Well, so long, pumpkin,” Paul was about to say, when Kym blurted out her last words to him, without meeting his eye.
“Make sure you take the cat with you, okay?” Then she dashed back inside the house.
Since then Paul had worked his way down the hierarchy of Lamar’s cheapest rentals. As the money Kym loaned him ran out, Paul was forced to sell off his books, his stereo, and his computer. The day after he fetched up at the Angry Loner Motel — the only place that would take him without references or a damage deposit — he found himself at last at a temp agency, being interviewed by Erika, a pert young woman unnecessarily lacquered in makeup. She reminded Paul alternately of Anchorwoman Kym and of a younger Mrs. Prettyman.
“So you were an English professor!” she said, flipping through the ring binder of jobs. “That’s really good. You must have an awesome typing score!”
The next day he was working at TxDoGS and coming home every night to Charlotte, who began to assert her baleful presence more and more strongly. She shut off the air conditioner to leave Paul gasping and drenched with sweat in the middle of the night, then made it roar to life again just as he was getting back to sleep. She switched off the lights when he was trying to read. She extinguished the burners in his kitchenette when he was trying to cook or boosted the flame unexpectedly and burned his food. She turned the water freezing cold or scaldingly hot when he was in the shower. At night, as he tried to settle into his lumpy mattress, he could hear her padding across the carpet or glimpse her slinking silhouette against the piss-yellow glow of the threadbare drapes. On bad nights he felt her walking on the bed, and on the worst ones he felt the sharp pressure of her legs as she stood on his chest and dug her front claws — claws she didn’t have when she was alive — into his flesh through his thin blanket, emitting a low hiss that froze the tip of his nose. When this happened, Paul squeezed his eyes shut and whimpered until Charlotte went away.
She was most inventive when it came to Paul’s last remaining amenity, an old portable black-and-white TV he had salvaged from someone’s curbside trash. Sometimes she allowed Paul to watch what he wanted, limiting herself to a cameo appearance, dozing on the windowsill in the interrogation room in Law and Order or trotting along the beach in Baywatch. At other times she took over the programming and aired gruesome footage of cheetahs ripping bloody lengths of flesh from quivering wildebeest or particularly savage maulings of zookeepers and lion tamers. She ran Morris the Cat commercials that hadn’t been broadcast in years; she resurrected lurid episodes of When Animals Attack or When Good Pets Go Bad; she kept Paul awake all night with Disney marathons—That Darn Cat, The Aristocats, and The Nine Lives of Thomasina. One night she sprawled across the top of the set and glowered at him, her tail lashing back and forth across the screen, as she aired an entire eight-episode cable documentary about the cat in history. Paul fell asleep that night to the stentorian narrator repeating for the umpteenth time that “the cat was worshipped as a god in ancient Egypt.”
Worst of all was the smell. The apartment and all its fixtures — the bed, the bath mat, the grotty carpet — reeked relentlessly of cat pee. Mrs. Prettyman notwithstanding, Paul never got used to it. One of the few good things about going to work at TxDoGS every day was that for nine hours at least he was free of the ammoniac reek of Charlotte’s ghostly urine. As it closed in around him now, Paul dropped onto one end of his foldout sofa and tossed the day’s shirt on the other.
“I don’t ask for much, Charlotte,” he said wearily, “not anymore.” He pitched his voice to the middle of the room. Who knew where the cat was? Who knew, indeed, if the concept of “where” even applied to the ghost of a cat? “But I had some good news today, the first good news in a very long time. For the first time since. . well, since I can remember, Charlotte, somebody was nice to me. Somebody did me a kindness, and he didn’t have to do it. Somebody treated me like a human being today.”
He paused to look cautiously about the room, at the crappy dresser, at the TV on the shaky little table by the window, at the broken-down armchair by the door. Nothing moved and only the air conditioner spoke, muttering glumly to itself.
“What do you care, right?” he continued. “You’re an animal, for chrissake. Hell, you’re not even alive.” Paul dropped his face into his hands. “I’m going crazy,” he moaned. “I’m talking to a dead cat.” He glanced up. “Of course, I don’t mean any disrespect by that. After all, it’s my fault.”
Paul flopped back against the cushions and tilted his head back. He felt tears pooling in the corners of his eyes, and he angrily wiped them away. He didn’t want to give her the satisfaction.
“All I’m asking,” he said, steadying his voice, “is for you to lay off me just this once. Cut me a little slack, okay? Let me sleep. Let me spend a night in peace, and I’ll. . I’ll. .” What? What leverage did he have with a ghost?
He pushed himself up from the couch and addressed the room at large. “You know what? Never mind. Forget I mentioned it. I’m sorry I bothered you.”
But strangely enough, Charlotte did not show or manifest herself all night, though he knew she was probably just setting him up for something worse later on. He managed to watch an entire evening of television without a glimpse of her. He rose in the morning almost refreshed, and he showered without any sudden temperature changes and fried his eggs without scorching them. After breakfast he crept towards the door clutching his bag lunch and his shirt for the day, certain that Charlotte was saving up something special for the last moment. But nothing happened as he pulled the door shut and locked it, and he released the doorknob as gingerly as if he were letting go of a hand grenade.
“Thank you,” he whispered, still not quite believing it. He dashed to his car, flung his shirt and lunch onto the passenger seat, and roared backward out of his parking spot, banging over the grate. His luck only improved once he hit the main road. Traffic was lighter than usual, the SUVs less overbearing, and Paul made the Travis Street Bridge in record time. The Bank of Texas told him that the time was only 7:54 and the temperature an improbably mild 77 degrees. A surprisingly sweet breeze blew off the river, and there was not a single creepy homeless guy in sight. No early morning guilt trip; no gnomic utterances. Paul felt like singing something cheerful, “Whistle While You Work,” say, or something brassy like “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” or even defiant, like “My Way.” By God! he thought. This is what comes of taking charge of your life, this is what comes of asking for what you want.